Mahogany Phillips is one of about 350 transgender patients treated this year at Mount Sinai’s Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery. It is the only comprehensive transgender medicine clinic in New York City, with some 500 people on its waiting list. Jess Ting, MD, surgical director of Mount Sinai’s Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery and assistant professor of plastic and reconstructive surgery at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, is the center’s head surgeons and only of only 40 surgeons in the US who perform gender confirming surgery. “What was surprising to me the most was how life-changing these operations are and how desperate our patients are to have surgery,” Dr. Ting said. Bella Avanessian, MD, is the program’s first surgical fellow, she had been looking for a trans medicine training program for more than two year, before the Mount Sinai appointment, no one was available to teach her.